The Beginners Guide to Clean Eating

Clean eating is gaining popularity at the moment and fits in with some popular diets like the Paleo Diet, 5:2 Diet, I Quit Sugar diet and Mediterranean Diet.

For those new to the concept, here’s our beginners guide to clean eating.

What is Clean Eating?

Clean eating is eating whole foods in their most natural form.

Clean eating encourages the consumption of fruit, vegetables, natural sources of protein and healthy fats. What’s discouraged is eating processed foods, particularly those with high levels of added sugar and sodium (salt), and additives.

Proponents of clean eating say that it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle centred on simplifying your diet.

How to Eat Clean

One of the great things about clean eating is that it is very simple, and the principles of clean eating are the ones that dietitians have been promoting for as long as you can remember.

Here are the keys to eating clean:

• Eating seasonal and locally sourced plant based foods (fruit and vegetables) should form the bulk of your diet
• Eat lean sources of protein, ideally from humanely and locally farmed sources, like free range eggs
• Eat complex carbohydrates from whole grain sources
• Avoid processed foods wherever possible, particularly white foods (made using white flour, white sugar and added salt), with high levels of added sugar and salt
• Read food labels and choose foods with as few ingredients in the ingredients list as possible
• Drink water instead of fruit juices and soft drink
• Use healthy cooking methods to prepare your meals, like grilling, stir frying or steaming instead of deep frying
• Keep alcohol consumption down as much as possible
• Eat as many home cooked meals as possible each week at the expense of take away
• Shop the perimeter of the supermarket only (all the processed foods tend to be in the middle of the store)
• Choose organically grown food if and when possible

Some supporters of clean eating also suggest grazing throughout the day by consuming five to six times per day, with three main meals and two healthy snacks per day.

Clean Eating Recipes

One of the most important principles of clean eating is to make foods yourself from scratch whenever possible. This ensures that you control what goes into your meals, that additives can be kept to a minimum and that you can choose the healthiest cooking methods.

The recipes we’ve listed here follow some of the more significant principles of clean eating, like eating seasonal vegetables, lean sources of protein, whole grains and healthy cooking methods:

Conclusion

Extreme followers of clean eating would say that we should be doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint and only be eating organic foods raw. For most of us, this is unnecessary and we would benefit greatly from following some of the simple principles of clean eating without going to these extremes.

For the majority of us, eating clean doesn't mean eating everything raw and straight from the ground. It means choosing minimally processed foods with as few ingredients on the label as possible, or with no label at all.

Give clean eating a try, you should feel better and start losing weight shortly after you do.

Good luck with your weight loss and thanks for visiting weightloss.com.au.

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